All black except for a yellow, green, and blue image on the chest bearing the likeness of a Filipino-looking man wearing a yellow hat. And at its center gleams the slogan, wait for it—LARRY ITLIONG FOREVER!
“Who?” I hear you asking right about now. Because the truth is you’ve never heard of him, am I right?
Neither had I.
Until just over four months ago, when the New York Times published a major expose’ revealing Cesar Chavez as a creep. More specifically, a man who’d spent years sexually assaulting and raping women and girls, some as young as 12.
Chavez, you may recall, was the Mexican American activist previously credited with organizing the 1965 grape growers’ strike in Delano, California. It lasted five years, gave rise to the United Farm Workers union, and majorly impacted labor movements throughout America as well as, to a lesser extent, worldwide.
As a result, the famous farm organizer—who died in 1993—was christened the Martin Luther King of California, with schools, statues, holidays, streets, plazas and buildings bearing his name.
The Times article changed all that, prompting civic leaders to virtually fall over themselves in a race to cancel Chavez, pretending he never existed. And that’s when we started hearing about Larry Itliong.
Born in San Nicholas, Philippines, Itliong emigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1929, eventually joining the so-called “Manong Generation” as a migrant farm laborer in California. And it was there that he—not Chavez, it turns out—organized that first strike. But the Filipinos, needing help, recruited the Mexicans and Chavez. Who promptly stepped into the limelight, taking the credit that ultimately made him famous.
“Perhaps California has found its new icon,” I speculated in a column about Itliong in April.
Now there’s a movement afoot to make sure that happens. Enter Johnny Itliong, the Filipino labor leader’s 61-year-old son, born and raised in Delano. Since his father’s death in 1977, the younger Itliong says, he’s devoted his life to resurrecting and securing the man’s legacy. That, according to yet another New York Times piece published just over a week ago.
“I have been fighting to get the story of my father out for decades,” the newspaper reported him saying at an event designed for that purpose.
The son, however, seems hardly like the father. Described as a thrice-divorced “mobile” vagrant living “on-and-off” in Los Angeles “mostly hanging around the beach,” Itliong junior is said to be estranged from his children, never having paid child support. He also, according to the Times, was convicted of domestic violence in 2004 after allegedly slapping and assaulting his then-wife, who was sitting on the toilet.
And yet he seems to have become the de facto consultant to a loose-knit group of “Asian American civil rights activists” interested in reviving his father’s legacy. “This is a very critical moment,” one of them told the newspaper. “We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot.”
You’re probably wondering by now what all this has to do with T-shirts. Fair question, let me explain. A few months ago, I spent some time in Los Angeles myself with Eliseo Art Silva, a prominent Fil Am artist and the subject of my latest Sunday Times Magazine cover story (the Manila Times, mind you, not the other one).
Anyway, it turned out that Silva had been boosting Itliong long before I ever heard of him. Which prompted him to give me that self-designed, now-favorite T-shirt bearing the farmworker’s likeness.
I was reminded of all that while reading the recent New York Times piece carrying not one, but—count ‘em—two photos of Itliong-themed murals painted by Silva, plus a photo of him standing next to the crusading son.
And yet not a single mention of the artist’s name.
“I wrote the photographer,” he assured me later, but “have yet to hear back.”
Just what we need: another forgotten Filipino.
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David Haldane is an award-winning American journalist, author, and former radio broadcaster with homes in Southern California and Northern Mindanao. His latest book is Dark Skies: Tales of Turbulence in Paradise. This column appears weekly in The Manila Times.
